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ROBERT HUGHES
Artists sometimes produce works which are prophetic to the point of self-parody; one of these was an ink-and-crayon drawing Henry Moore made in 1942, which was reproduced on the invitation to his recent retrospective at the Tate and is spread across two pages in this book. On a gloomy plain, twenty or so figures huddle silently together, gazing reverently up at a totem-like object swaddled in tarpaulins and packing-rope. The idea may derive from Man Ray's surrealist object, 'The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse'; but the thing under the wrapping has inevitably come to look like a sculpture by Henry Moore, cif, about to be unveiled after an alfresco banquet given by the Arts Council.
Moore may, like Horace, have earned a monument more lasting than bronze, but one can imagine no work of his more apt to inflame the feelings of those younger artists who, last year, wrote a snappish round-robin to The Times protesting against Moore's bequest of several dozen sculptures to the Tate on the grounds that it would freeze the avant-garde by monumentalising a Grand Old Man still further. This book may irritate them again. It is a monument, and conceived as such: part of the general festschrift organised by English publishers and TV producers for Moore's seventieth birthday. It is the size, and nearly the weight, of a small Attic stele. (Moore's sculptures need bases; his book, appropriately, a lectern.) And it is written by Moore him- self.
It is a seductive book, proffering a grainy, Tri-X Pan intimacy, which begins with .a double-page spread inside the flap—Henry Moore extending his seamed and calloused palms towards the lens, looking for all the world like a Victorian allegory of the Spirit of Useful Labour displaying the Instruments of Trade. From there, the images pile up: a slag-heap at Castleford silhouetted against hardly less black and granular sky, a Roman- esque corbel shot to look like an early Moore, and landscapes of Tanguy-like pebbles on a Devon beach, rood-crosses leaning against a dark horizon, grey fence-posts in white snow. Ponies graze, in colour, among the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. The camera pokes into the studio, dwelling with fascination on the clutter of pebbles, tools, maquettes and bird-bones; it follows Moore to an Italian beach (the patriarch untruss'd), to the marble quarries of Carrara (another shot of his by now over- familiar hands, caressing the grain of stone), and back to Much Hadham (Moore playing ping-pong, peering in medallic profile through a bronze gap, and cavorting in one of his daughter's wigs). And, sandwiched in between, some of the best photographs ever taken of Moore's sculpture, shot with unexpected truth to the plump density of bronze, the silk-sheen of marble and the coarse inert surface of concrete.
The aim of this luscious treatment is to
give the reader the illusion that he 'knows Moore'; it reflects, more than any art book recently produced in England, the impact of cultural telly on publishing. We are permeated by the romantic fallacy of love my dog, love me : if art is wholly, or mainly, self-expression, then the better we know the artist the more we will understand his art. It is this line which produces such a market for albumsful of Picasso camping about in a fig leaf and a funny paper hat. The hero becomes human in play, and the underlying assumption is that he is not human when at work.
The Hedgecoe-Moore book does not, much to its credit, descend to so crude a level of echt-intimacy, but the romantic line about the self is still there. If Richard Avedon had got into Duccio's studio with a Hasselblad and snapped him wassailing with the superintendent of the Opera de Duomo di Siena, how much more information would that have given us about the Maesta? One's unease is not, obvi- ously, prompted by the feeling that privacy has been violated, since Henry Moore co- operated enthusiastically with Hedgecoe—and for six years at ihat. '
My point is rathEr that photo-essays of this kind (even when they are as finely shot as Hedgeaoe's) have little use except in a society 'Which responds to 'the work of its artists largely in terms of glamour, personality and mark& Far from bringing the audience closer to the object, they offer the illusion that a profound alienation between artist and audience, which can only be closed by the work, can somehow be papered over by other means. I know of no book about a living artist which perpetuates this illusion with better photographs or a more dignified lay- out; of its genre, it is a supreme labour of love. Which does not, alas, solve the problem of the irrelevance of the genre itself to the central questions involved in publishing books about art.
John Hedgecoe has taken on the daunting task of producing photographs as metaphors of another man's vision. Sometimes he very nearly succeeds, though on familiar ground— his parallel images of rippled beach-sand, wood and chisel cuts, for instance, are among the best of their kind. (Perversely, I hope they will also be the last. A book on Moore with- out roots and flintstones would be as precious an escape from metaphor as a film on Bar- bara Hepworth without those St Ives seagulls creaking obstreperously on the soundtrack.) At other times he does not. The nude photos, invested with grainy, tissue-like delicacy, have little in common with the massive crankshaft bulges of Moore's female torsoes; however Moore experiences the nude, it cannot, one feels, be in such terms.
Henry Moore's own text is bluff, direct, in- teresting and,-perhaps, a bit of a mask. One may have no right to expect the degree of introspection that characterises the writings of Delacroix or Van Gogh, but it is frustrating to read Moore on, for instance, monumen- tality: 'Some works have it and other don't. It's almost impossible to define,' and basta. But the text reveals a lot about his pre- occupations as an artist, and nobody con- cerned with his work can afford not to have read it; the concise, jargon-free prose abun- dantly makes up for the moments when he alludes to; but is unforthcoming about, some issue whose analysis is vital to our grasp of his sculpture.
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